"I had experienced absolute freedom--I had felt that my body was without
boundaries, limitless; that pain didn't matter, that nothing mattered at
all--and it intoxicated me."
In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramovic's
MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate
with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that
lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of
groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina
Abramovic is truly a force of nature.
The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito's regime in postwar
Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was
beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at
home under her mother's abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m.
curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to
connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor--all of
which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through
Walls is an operatic love story--a twelve-year collaboration with
fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a
van traveling across Europe--a relationship that began to unravel and
came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China.
Marina's story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an
incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the
limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest
for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of
performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and
powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.
